Adaptation

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a question that has plagued me my entire life. When I was a wee lass, a niña chiquita, I had it worked out three ways. I was going to become an artist, a writer and an actress.

Before I could spell my name, I often scribbled on scraps of paper, line after wavy line of brilliant, imagined prose. As I didn’t have a paintbrush, I constructed my own from a clothespin and a playing card, making big, broad imaginary strokes of vibrant color on the wall. I played dress-up by the hours, my grandmother commenting that she’d never seen another little girl change clothes so many times in a day.

After graduating high school, I studied in Japan and decided I wanted to become an English teacher living abroad. I attended college in the States, earning a degree in English literature with the intent of returning to The Land of the Rising Sun, or as I call it because of the diet of gluton-y rice and gluttony of snacks, The Land of the Rising Belly.

That’s not what happened. I met Groom and started making jewelry while finishing my last term of college. Immediately after graduation, I was invited to share a booth at the Saturday Market and then we started doing Art Fairs and Festivals and now a skosh more than 18 years later, we’re still making jewelry.

One of the best gifts of 2009 was the realization that maybe designing jewelry was our thing.

Let me back up.

While in school, my career goal - the carrot dangling at the long end of the college stick – had been to return to Japan and resume the life I had made for myself. Groom’s career goal had been to become a teacher as well, that’s how we met. Through a series of events, including a ballot measure that eliminated the program, it did not happen.

Instead, we sort of fell into making jewelry.

Making jewelry did not fit into our plans. It was not what we studied or why we pulled the all-nighters to make the grade and switch the tassel. In other words, we never took it seriously; we were only creating jewelry until we discovered our true calling. Throughout the past 18 years, we have tried to quit. A woman offered to buy our business, and once we put everything into storage and took a year’s leave of absence.

In 2002, I got a wild hair and decided to juggle the Art Fairs and Festivals while attending beauty school for 18 months. After logging 2300 hours of what I acerbically call “community service,” I received my hair and aesthetician’s license. Nope. Turns out that was not my real thing either.

Groom has a sideline as a Site Inspector for construction loans and has also written a book called Why Doesn’t He Get It?, but while he certainly enjoys it, it’s not his real thing.

I wrote last week that for some, identity and clarity come easily. For us, it’s been an adventure, trying this, experimenting with that. While our journey unnerves some people (“When are you just going to pick one thing and settle down?”), it has inspired others.

I remember a woman I worked with at a hair salon. Realizing I was stinking miserable, I finally summoned the courage to give my notice (it was a pretty big deal at this point because I had already invested three years of my life and had $14,000 in school loans). She came up to me on my last day and said with tears in her eyes that she, too, was miserable and in physical pain. Because she was so successful and her family depended on her income, she felt trapped and could not quit. She expressed her admiration for me accepting that I didn’t love doing hair and getting out before it was too late.

In that moment, I did not know it really was too late for her. She died less than two weeks later, falling off the back of her husband’s motorcycle. That conversation haunts me. She felt too committed to her family and customers to follow her heart and yet they all must learn how to live without her income and mad hair skills anyway. Life is too short indeed.

So while some people would prefer that we pick a course and stay with it, we can live more at peace with ourselves knowing that we have taken risks and tried new things. (If you click on the photos, you can enlarge them to for better detail and then simply hit the back button to return to the blog. If you do this to the photo with the Paul Mitchell signage, see if you can spot me.)

Two years ago, a well known goldsmith who has been following our work, stopped by the booth to deliver a message. Born in Europe, she said in her beautiful accent, “You must take your jewelry to the next level. If you combined metalsmithing skills with your ideas, there’s no telling where you could go.”

Her cadent words stayed with me.

In the next couple months, we bumped up against a rude surprise. With the “economic downturn,” more people than ever are returning to the arts and crafts for potential income and this means greater competition in the Market Place. The category for jewelry is already deluged with applications for the few booth spots allocated in the show circuit, but add a few thousand more applicants and the competition to get INTO the shows has increased exponentially.

With the influx, rules in the industry are changing which only adds to the steep climb. Groom and I have been facing a moment in our evolution; we either quit the business or adapt and grow. We spent 2009 with this question snaking its way into everything. What shall we do? What’s our real thing? While reflecting (read questioning, railing, obsessing), we thought back on the ways in which money has most easily flowed: Writing and designing jewelry.

While going through the entire process of writing, editing, publishing and marketing Why Doesn’t He Get It? we both came to the realization that neither of us truly possesses the passion for the business of writing. Yes, I love creating this blog each week, but it is enough. My itch for combining and rearranging words is thoroughly scratched every seven days and it leaves me completely sated. I have no desire leftover to write anything else and that tells me a lot.

But we love creating things with our hands. If we quit our business, what else would we do? In what learning curve would we invest time, money and ourselves?

Uh-oh, I can see that I’m running out of room. Guess I’ll have to pick up that thread next week. Stay tuned…